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While you might never have heard of Motif Studios, you have most probably seen some of the diverse work they have been involved in since they started out five years ago. Over the past year, the company has co-directed Jack Parow and Freshlyground’s Army of One music video, in which Jan Bont (Jack Parow), the character which “Rambo and Terminator were based on”, according to the lyrics, saves Geldpenni (Freshlyground’s Zolani Mahola), James Bond style.
They did clean-ups on over 120 shots of the Hollywood blockbuster starring our own Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road and were solely responsible for smoothing out that thrilling chase scene at the end of the movie. They created all the visual interfaces and some of the visual effects for the Sacha Baron Cohen spy comedy The Brothers Grimsby. They created backdrops of Las Vegas 25 years into the future as well as digital versions of actors for the American cable channel Syfy’s successful angels-versus-humans series, Dominion. And Motif Studios won the best short film award for their short film Destination at the Miami Independent Film Festival in December 2015.
Craig Parker, who founded the company, feels that Motif Studios’ success lies in the company’s willingness to collaborate and share ideas with other artists.
Why did you start Motif Studios?
I worked as a graphic designer for a broadcast design company that specialised in branded commercials and TV channel adverts. The company won many awards – one that sticks in my mind is the PromaxBDA award for an M-Net TV commercial. After more than 10 years at the company, I felt I was not reaching my full potential. I felt isolated from other artists and what was going on in the industry.
I have always had a keen interest in animation and visual film-making, so I decided to start Motif Studios. The original idea was for Motif Studios to provide visual effects in the broadcasting industry in general, from advertisements to movies and music videos. Of late, we are however gravitating more towards movies and our services have become more diverse to also include set designs, animation, some visual effects and movie directing.
Where did you get the funding to start Motif Studios?
I started working straight after I finished my graphic design diploma at the Cape Technikon and did a lot of freelance jobs on the side. During that time, I managed to save up enough money to keep me and two partners, who started the business with me, going for three months. Jacques Bock is still with the company today as the sales and production coordinator. We later had to buy out the other partner – this was a whole new side to owning a company that we had to deal with.
In retrospect, we could have looked for funding somewhere, but then again it might have resulted in some unnecessary complications later. The understanding was that I would foot the salaries and expenditures. The money would be paid back to me once the company started making money. Except for the salaries, which were basically just enough to keep us going, we didn’t have many overheads. We met once or twice a week in a 15m2 office we rented in Cape Town and most of our energy was spent on trying to source clients.
We should have perhaps also done more research on how we should structure the company to reduce conflict and the financial impact the exit of a partner would have.
How did you market the business?
We started with a portfolio of our prior work. From there we built a company portfolio with work done by the company. This portfolio is updated each year to keep clients up to date with our work. We had a Facebook page from the start to keep people informed of what we were doing and also made extensive use of Vimeo to share videos. The nice thing about Vimeo is that the more you put onto it, the better you look. We got quite a few overseas jobs through it. We are using Twitter, but not as often. Twitter hasn’t really rubbed off on me yet.
Would you say it was difficult to break into the industry? Is there a lot of competition?
Yes, but winning awards for work we had previously done helped to give us an edge. While people were not familiar with us as a company, they were familiar with our work. This helped to convince people to take a chance on us.
At the moment I would say there is less competition, or more opportunities, in Johannesburg if you want to get involved in animation and post-production in advertising. In contrast, there seem to be more opportunities in Cape Town for movies and visual effects. Internet and improved processing speed is nevertheless changing the way business is being done, so that the location from which you work is no longer that important. We are collaborating with many people from all over the world. Working with Americans is especially nice, because we are a day ahead of the United States.
What was your first real break?
Well, in spite of a lot of canvassing, meetings and cold calling, we didn’t get any business until about the last week of the third month. It was really nerve-wracking. Then all of a sudden we landed advertising jobs with the digital agency Hello Computer, and BP fuel company. We had two to three weeks for the BP animation job, so we worked ridiculous hours to pull it off in time. From there things picked up and we never looked back.
What was one of the greatest lessons you’ve learnt?
With only two graphic designers, including myself, we were working ourselves into a state to meet deadlines for almost two years before we decided to expand the company. I think we were close to burn-out. So the biggest lesson I have learnt so far was about knowing when to grow and when you can afford it.
One reason why it was so difficult to make this change was that we needed to be certain of a constant stream of income to employ more people. Because we were so young, it was difficult to identify market trends. We realised later that the movie season usually slowed over winter, while the visual effects and post-production season then actually kicked in.
At the moment we have four permanent employees, with a possibility of a fifth one. We had six at our peak, but I think four is a good number for us. It makes sense to use freelancers on an as-needed basis. We are renting bigger office space now with enough space to accommodate up to 30 people for when we are involved in big projects. When we are not using all this space, we open up space to other creative companies, which helps to reduce overheads for us and them.
Is it easy to get good staff?
It is quite difficult, as most of the experienced, well-skilled artists are older and no longer want to work full-time for companies. So you have to contract them as freelancers. We have managed to employ once such worker, which means that he has the initiative and insight to run with a project without much input from me.
We offer internships, which allow us to identify promising workers. The problem with interns is that you really have to invest a lot of time and energy into getting them in line with what you need. We have however employed one person that used to work here as an intern.
What was one of your biggest challenges?
Registering the company and getting our head around taxes. We didn’t know of any incentives for new businesses, we tried to find out but there weren’t many mentors in this field.
Thankfully we had a financial advisor who also worked with a couple of other companies in the filming and advertising industry.
How has the film industry grown since you got involved in it in 2011?
The South African government has been offering great tax incentives since 2011 to attract international production houses to shoot on location and conduct post-production in South Africa. This, in combination with the weakness of the rand against other major currencies, our great diversity of wonderful locations, good weather, top crews and studio facilities have resulted in the industry growing well.
The film industry, according to the City of Cape Town, has contributed about R5bn to the Western Cape economy and has created more than 35 000 jobs over the past three years. I think the Cape Town Film Studio has also attracted a lot of investors and directors and is allegedly booked out for the next couple or so years. It is also spurring local talent in all fields involved in the industry. The great thing from the tax incentives is that rebates go to individuals, which means that it is easy to collaborate with other companies without individuals losing these advantages. We actually started the Brave New World collaboration to boost collaborative efforts with other companies that are involved in the movie industry. [The companies within Brave New World work together to supply services. When one company cannot supply a specific service, it will distribute it to another company rather than turning down the job.]
This article originally appeared in in the 8 December edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.
